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The 'good' Facebook you are looking for has to charge its users for accounts because that is the only way to pay the bills without selling you off to less purie

by evgen 15y ago

The 'good' Facebook you are looking for has to charge its users for accounts because that is the only way to pay the bills without selling you off to less purient interests. Is that related to how the only 'good' search engine would be one that has to charge you per-search lest it be forced to sell your click info and search terms to less prurient interests?

tomp 15y ago
Personally, I would rather be stalked by a search engine than by a social network that has seen my photos and knows who my friends are. However, with the arrival of G+, this issue has become far more serious...
- hack_edu 15y ago
  You can always ignore G+ and browse like you used to. Hell, create a whole new Google Account completely disconnected from your prior history and G+ connections on your main account. Thats what I did right as it came out.
- fudged 15y ago
  The difference is that the connections on G+ hold much less meaning than the connections on Facebook. Facebook automatically populates specifically-named friend lists based on your network data and asks that you refine their lists to improve their data collection. Essentially, users who choose not to provide Facebook with their close friends, family, university, and location will be scoped out and tagged by their own friends using these smart lists. It's a disturbing strategy for data collection.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
Its a fair point. One would hope that the only information you share with advertisers is what the person is looking for, not things like they just signed up for a ski vacation with family, or recently became single, Etc. One of the ways Blekko (a search engine) differentiates itself in this space is by having a privacy policy that let you keep all of your data private, up to and including not being advertised to at all. (and yes I work there, and no this isn't my pushing 'my' search engine, just that you applied your response to search engines and there is an existence proof of folks who took that step to give you the option of not sharing anything about your searches with anyone)

by evgen 15y ago

tomp 15y ago

Personally, I would rather be stalked by a search engine than by a social network that has seen my photos and knows who my friends are. However, with the arrival of G+, this issue has become far more serious...

hack_edu 15y ago
You can always ignore G+ and browse like you used to. Hell, create a whole new Google Account completely disconnected from your prior history and G+ connections on your main account. Thats what I did right as it came out.
fudged 15y ago
The difference is that the connections on G+ hold much less meaning than the connections on Facebook. Facebook automatically populates specifically-named friend lists based on your network data and asks that you refine their lists to improve their data collection. Essentially, users who choose not to provide Facebook with their close friends, family, university, and location will be scoped out and tagged by their own friends using these smart lists. It's a disturbing strategy for data collection.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

Its a fair point. One would hope that the only information you share with advertisers is what the person is looking for, not things like they just signed up for a ski vacation with family, or recently became single, Etc. One of the ways Blekko (a search engine) differentiates itself in this space is by having a privacy policy that let you keep all of your data private, up to and including not being advertised to at all. (and yes I work there, and no this isn't my pushing 'my' search engine, just that you applied your response to search engines and there is an existence proof of folks who took that step to give you the option of not sharing anything about your searches with anyone)